Cruzando Disciplinary Fronteras y Abriendo Puertas for Translanguaging and Experiential Knowledge With Intertextual Multimodal Texts

• In Event: Multiliteracies in Diverse Contexts: New Possibilities for School and Community Collaboration

Abstract

When teachers integrate bilingual/bicultural practices with culturally sustaining purposes, they support emergent bilingual learners (EBLs) bilingualism and biliteracy development, and disciplinary learning by affirming their identities, cultural backgrounds, and linguistic practices (Paris & Alim, 2017). Rowsell, Kosnick, and Beck’s (2008) multiliteracies pedagogy (MP) incorporates culturally sustaining practices and considers 1) teacher and students’ interaction with multimodal texts and the ways they are used in collaboration with each other, 2) functional literacy practices, 3) and contextualized classroom settings. In the context of the US, few studies address the implementation of MP with a focus on EBLs linguistic practices and learning experiences (Macy, 2016; Skerrett, 2015; Vinogradova, 2011). MP in bilingual and elementary settings with a culturally sustaining purpose has yet to be explored. This paper considers the affordances of MP for EBLs by defining multimodal texts; describing how teachers and students interact with them as they travel within and across language arts, science, and social studies; and analyzes the opportunities multimodal texts bring to EBLs’ bilingual/biliteracy development, and disciplinary learning.

I build on Jewitt’s (2008) agenda for MP with a social justice aim in which scholars “attend to the multiple and multimodal texts and wide range of literacy practices that students are engaged with…questioning the traditional monologic relationship between teacher and student, setting out to make the classroom walls more porous and…tak[ing] the students’ experiences, interests, and existing technological and discourse resources as a starting point.” (p. 245). I also draw from intertextuality theory, or the “juxtaposition of texts,” to show how EBLs relate texts during literacy events and practices in different disciplines. I explore how participants practice “texturing,” where texts travel “from one social practice to another, from one event to another, from one text to another” (Fairclough, 1999, p. 89).

I draw from data of a larger case study (Stake, 1995) in a 3rd grade dual language classroom. I used ethnographic methods to collect data in the form of observations, interviews, and artifacts (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). I coded based on the linguistic and literacy practices happening during the juxtaposition of texts using constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss,1967).

I found out how in this bilingual classroom, when the teacher introduced MP, we observe the juxtaposition of texts in a variety of modes such as articles, notebooks, children’s picture books, anchor charts, gestures, photographs, realia, drawings, and other written texts in the form of poems and song lyrics. Additionally, intertextuality across disciplines occurred bidirectionally. Intertextualization in this teacher’s classroom appeared to support students’ learning of language and content. MP in a bilingual classroom allows for EBLs to translanguage as a resource. This study helps us begin to understand the ways in which teachers can incorporate intertextuality in their bilingual classroom. Traveling disciplinary texts abren puertas to support language and content learning by centering EBLs translanguaging practices and cultural knowledge.

Author

• Lucia Cardenas Curiel, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author